It is crucial to the successful operation of a dry cleaning establishment that the owner or operator have a system whereby he can keep track of a customer's clothes not only during the cleaning operation but after the cleaning operation has been completed as well. To accomplish this, various systems including conveyors and other types of storage devices have been developed for maintaining completed dry cleaning in an orderly manner and also allowing random access to a wide variety of customer orders. The most commonly used system involves a conveyor which supports the hangers containing the finished clothes and which can be operated to move the clothes past an attendant so that the attendant may quickly select the customer's order.
A major problem encountered in the use of these storage and access systems is that garments, especially single or small garments on a single hanger become lost. This may occur when the attendant hands out cleaned garments to a customer, and accidentally delivers the single hanger order with the group of hangers containing the customer's actual order. Also, it is sometimes difficult to identify a particular customer's order or to determine the beginning and end points of a customer's order along the conveyor, assuming that all of a customer's order is kept together. For example, a customer may deliver four garments to a dry cleaner for cleaning and these garments may in turn be supported by two hangers on the conveyor. It would take a substantial amount of time to examine each of several thousand hangers to find the order and then be certain that the order is wholly contained on the two hangers without some sort of coding system. While larger orders may be easier to locate on the conveyor, it would take a proportionately longer amount of time to determine the beginning and end points of the order.
The use of tags stapled to a garment cover and numbered in some manner gives no provision for avoiding the attendant's accidentally picking up more than the customer's order, especially if there is a small order immediately adjacent that customer's order. Other indicia use color-coded devices applicable to safety pins (U.S. Pat. No. 2,564,029) to distinguish laundry bags. These are too small to be used on a coat hanger and lack the middle bellows to enable them to bend around a curved hanger hook. Other prior efforts have included hook covers (U.S. Pat. No. 3,120,913) sometimes color-coded (U.S. Pat. No. 3,112,050) or color-coded hanger spacers (U.S. Pat. No. 3,482,746), but these are permanent additions to the hangers, are too expensive to be used for present purposes, and/or are too large and bulky to be used for present purposes. Also, this type of system does not aid the location of small orders on the conveyor as the tags are usually all placed in a similar location on the garments and a fast conveyor speed merely blends the colors or code together.
Most dry cleaners handle a large proportion of their business in small orders and losses from these small orders may be quite substantial. Thus, it becomes not only a financial matter but also one of customer satisfaction that an operator of a dry cleaning establishment provide for the careful and efficient handling of smaller orders.
Applicant has succeeded in developing a very inexpensive indicator tube device which allows an attendant to easily mark and identify any order and distinguish it from other garments. Applicant's invention includes a small, plastic tubular body of plastic material such as polystyrene that is somewhat stiff, having a medial unitary bellows section enabling the device to bend so that it can be fitted over the hook end of a hanger and slid down to the neck area where it may be readily seen and observed by an attendant as he indexes the conveyor along. The signal tube may carry identifying colors or distinguishing shapes by which it can clearly indicate the same quality of the products on the hanger, or of the order involved with them. For example, the indicia may identify it both as a small order and also the type of garment carried on the hanger. Any type of color or pattern configuration may be used to encode the signal tubes and is limited only by the imagination of the user. In addition, identifying structure which either protrudes or is otherwise readily seen may be added to the signal tube to provide a greater combination of coding. Applicant's invention is much more effective than systems previously used as the signal tube slides over the hook and rests on the neck of the hanger at a level above the confusing array of clothes and garment bags. Thus, an attendant's eye can easily pick out and identify a greater number of orders than before.
The device may be shaped, as will appear, with a flared section and a tapered section at opposite ends thereof, to enable it to fit snugly around the shoulder area of the hanger and to provide a snug fit at the top of the signal tube adjacent the neck area. Locking nibs may be provided at the lower end of the flared section and snap over the shoulder area of the hanger to aid in securing the signal tube to the hanger. Either of the shapes disclosed herein may have serrations extending upwardly from the top straight section to provide a more snug fit and help prevent the accidental removal of the signal tube from the hanger.